Would You or Wouldn't You: Illusion Hair

Few photos can get me to pause my speedy Instagram scrolling: The short list is pretty much adorable cats, top-notch Kardashian selfies, and this hair (above). If you look quickly, it appears that that the woman in the picture (Ruth Gruca) has a brown lob. But look again. Yup, half of her hair has been dyed to match her shirt. I reached out to Aura Friedman, her colorist at Sally Hershberger, to get the scoop.

“Ruth came in with the idea of making it look like her hair was cut into a bob,” says Friedman, who's no stranger to freaky-cool looks (she's also done tiger-print, rainbow, and even glow-in-the-dark dye jobs). “There have been so many variations of silver and gray hair trends happening, so I was excited.” She painted a lightener across Gruca's hair in a super (super!) straight line, then applied the gray tone to the bottom half.

The faux-bob optical illusion obviously only works with that particular shirt or color, so it's not exactly versatile. But it is definitely the coolest effect I’ve seen in hair color since Marc Jacobs’s fall 2014 pink-gray wigs and Aura’s invention of "splashlights" (more on that here).